Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self

by Claire Tomalin

  26. A Journey to be Made

  On 29 September 1693, the feast of Michaelmas, Pepys was driven by his coachman out of London and into the country towards the riverside village of Chelsea; they may have been on their way to dine with friends, or simply going to take the air. With him in the coach were some ladies and his nineteen-year-old nephew John, who was sporting a silver-hilted sword. The road ran through meadowland and past isolated farms and a few large villas. When three men on horseback, armed and wearing masks, appeared and put one pistol to the breast of the coachman and another to Pepys, there could be no thought of putting up a fight. The men asked what he had, and he handed over his purse with about £3 in it and the various necessaries he carried with him, his silver ruler, his gold pencil, his magnifying glass and five mathematical instruments. It made an impressive collection, and when he asked to have back one particular instrument he was told that, since he was a gentleman, as his assailant claimed to be also, if he sent to the Rummer Tavern in Charing Cross the following day he should have it. John gave up his sword and hatband. Pepys asked the highwaymen to be civil to the ladies and not to frighten them; and some of the ladies were frightened, but one kept her wits about her: ‘My Lady Pepys saved a Bag of Money that she had about her.’1 So read the law report from which this story comes, because two of the men were tried for the crime at the Old Bailey in December. The men, Thomas Hoyle and Samuel Gibbons, were found guilty partly through the evidence of a witness who saw their faces as they pulled off their masks, and partly because Hoyle was taken at the Rummer Tavern with Pepys’s pencil in his possession. Pepys gave evidence at the trial but he would not swear they were the men concerned because he had not seen their faces. Both, however, were found guilty of felony and robbery, condemned to death and hanged. The most quick-witted member of the party seems to have been Mary Skinner – Lady Pepys for the occasion – who managed to keep her money safe under her skirts. She was not asked to be a witness, but she was clearly a force to be reckoned with.

  Pepys did not learn to like King William any better as the years went by, but a moment came when he consented to act as an adviser to the regime. It was through Evelyn, a good fixer, who suggested to a friend in government that Pepys was the man to be consulted about the project to build a hospital for sick and wounded seamen at Greenwich. Since it was something Pepys had discussed already with James II, he agreed to go to Greenwich again with Christopher Wren in November 1694 to consider what might be done. He was impressed by the ingenuity and splendour of Wren’s proposals, and wrote to Evelyn of ‘an Invalides with us for the sea, suitable in some degree to that of Paris for the land’. Practical as ever, he also pointed out that the scale of the plans meant the building would need parliamentary funding; and he was proved right, because the work suffered many delays through money running out. Clearly he was pleased to be offering advice once more; and the visit to Greenwich must also have sent his mind back to many earlier occasions – a ramble to the top of the hill with Lady Sandwich; a stroll with the king and the duke on a July morning, young Monmouth running and jumping in circles around them; and the winter of the plague, when he had lived in Greenwich lodgings, riotously. Now, thirty years later, the November afternoon closed the scene fittingly; it was the last official outing he was to make.2

  Evelyn was feeling his age – he was after all thirteen years older than Pepys – and this year he gave up his Deptford house and moved to Surrey. He still visited London, but occasions for meeting were fewer, and he was not at the council meeting of the Royal Society to which Pepys went soon after his Greenwich visit, to make sure that John Jackson was elected. All went well, and ‘Mr Jackson nephew to Mr Pepys and Mr Bridges son to Lord Chandos were ballotted and approved.’ Among those present were his old rival John Creed, up from Oundle; his old friend Robert Hooke; and a newer one, the widely travelled young doctor, naturalist and collector, Hans Sloane, acting as secretary of the society and just appointed physician in charge at Christ’s Hospital.3

  Sloane attended Pepys and Mary professionally, getting Mary to go horseback riding for her ‘dropsy’. Pepys lent the doctor books and borrowed some in return, enjoying his conversation so much that he wrote to him on one occasion ‘almost wishing myself sick, that I might have a pretence to invite you for an hour or two to another [visit] by yourself’.4 He and Sloane both did their best to encourage a still younger scholar, Humfrey Wanley, who had been a Coventry draper’s apprentice until his genius for deciphering and dating almost any piece of writing set before him was noticed by the local bishop, who sent him to Oxford. Pepys’s Oxford friends sent him with an introduction in 1695 when Wanley wanted to visit the celebrated Cottonian Library. Pepys arranged this, and showed him his own for good measure.5 Wanley became deputy librarian at the Bodleian; soon he was writing to the bookdealer John Bagford asking him to help in the pursuit of acquisitions from ‘any noble spirited and Worthy Gentlemen, who are Masters of any Curiosities which we want, and are or may be willing to part with to our Library… send me word in your next what may be done with Mr Pepys’.6 Wanley’s letters to Pepys are flattering, as the manners of the age required from a poor scholar to a potential benefactor, but they suggest real affection too. In one he assured Pepys that his conversation was ‘more nearly akin to what we are taught to hope for in Heaven than that of anybody else I know.’7 Wanley was on good terms with Mary and with Jackson too; as a palaeographer in constant quest of manuscripts he envied Jackson his chance to travel in Europe, and drafted a long letter to him with questions and suggestions. He also asked Pepys to support his own application to Oxford for funding to visit libraries on the Continent, and Pepys and Sloane both wrote testimonials for him.8 In such ways Pepys kept in touch with the most advanced scholars and scientists, refusing to allow age or illness to close his mind or dull his curiosity.

  He also kept up his interest in Christ’s Hospital. The mathematics department was his particular concern, and he was eager to see good results, often asking how the boys fared when they went to sea and sending directives to the staff. When at his request a group of the boys came to his house in 1695 for him to assess their progress, he was disappointed, diagnosed a general slackness in the organization of the school, started a row with the treasurer and wrote to Isaac Newton, no less, asking him to put up the name of a new mathematics master. Newton recommended a young graduate called Sam Newton – not a relation – for his good character and abilities; and after a few months in the job Sam Newton complained to Pepys that the children were being taken out of his hands too young. The school had been set up to educate the boys until they were sent to sea as apprentices at sixteen – but with the proviso ‘or if the Master of Trinity House sees fit earlier’. This was the problem, that they were being hauled off to sea before they had a chance to do any serious study by the master of Trinity House, Sir Matthew Andrews, who was also a governor of the school. Sam Newton laid out the situation in a letter to Pepys:

  comes Sir Matthew for a Boy, to be putt out the next week. I told him I had none ready, so he replied if there were none ready he must have one unready because he had promised one to a Sea Capt. and that hee would answer (I think he said excuse) the Boye’s unpreparedness to the Trinity House. It grieves me to my very Soul when I reflect upon such inconsiderate Actions, and that the most famous Mathematics School… should be thus torn in pieces by one man… [Such] proceedings will bring down the Honour & Reputation of the Famous Nursery to the level of an Abcdarian, and every common Tarpaulin who never knew either the usefulness or sweetness of Mathematical learning will run down our poor Children…: and in time this School which was created on purpose to improve our English seamen in Arts & Sciences (part. Navigation) will fall under the lowest degree of contempt.

  It was a brave letter, and it ended with a plea to Pepys to ‘find out some Expedient to stop this injurious Career’.9

  Pepys’s answer shocked Newton, because instead of standing up for the boys’ right to an education he insisted
that he must give way to Sir Matthew, ‘not only your Superiour, and so not decently to be contended with by you, but the Person whom you find in a special manner depended on by the House on business of the disposing of the Children’. Pepys had worked with Sir Matthew for years at Trinity House and was simply not prepared to take him on. Newton must apply himself to improving each child ‘in the little time allowed you for it’, he wrote, and give Certificates ‘in the decentest Terms you are able of the several heads of Science wherein you can safely assert the Child’s being instructed’.10 Here their exchange ends, leaving a dismal picture of boys being sent to sea untutored and too young to protest or escape, rather than receiving the education and care Christ’s Hospital had promised. Some may have preferred life at sea to lessons, and some ran away, but it was not what their families or benefactors expected. Pepys’s capitulation is the sadder because he believed so strongly in the need for education and its importance in raising standards in the navy; had he been younger and more fit, you feel, he would have taken up Newton’s cause.

  He was ill in both the spring and the autumn of 1697, and retreated to Will Hewer’s house at Clapham for several weeks in the summer. Clapham was then a mere scattering of village houses round a small church, and the house was one Pepys had visited and admired more than thirty years before.11 The departure of Thomas Gale to the deanery at York in the inaccessible north left him living almost like a monk, he grumbled when he got home to London. Yet at this same time he received a visit from his old college tutor Joseph Hill, now resident in Holland; he came with a daughter who made friends with Mary and proposed to take her back with her for a visit. Whether Mary went to Holland is uncertain. No letters of hers have survived, and none from Pepys to her. We know that she could write, since she took his dictation, but like Elizabeth she was made into a silent woman. There was a courtly letter from Pepys to her foster-sister Julia this year in which he assured Julia that he would never be guilty of neglecting her, but that ‘Indeed Madame the World and I have been strangers a great while’; and he goes on to quote verses on political melancholy, a veiled allusion to his Jacobitism.12

  The war against France ended in September 1697, and Louis XIV recognized William III as king of England. Then, in January 1698, the last great fire of Pepys’s lifetime reduced the whole of Whitehall Palace to ashes, leaving only the Banqueting House standing. It marked the end of the world in which he had lived and worked, where the royal family, courtiers and officials lived in sets of rooms, some hardly grander than those of college heads, and an intimacy developed among those who knew their way about that made it almost like a village. Now this way of life and all that went with it passed into history. Queen Mary had died in 1694, King William disliked Whitehall, and Wren’s plans for rebuilding were set aside. In the City at least his work was advancing, although neither the dome nor the towers of St Paul’s were finished during Pepys’s lifetime; but he must have admired the transformation of his boyhood territory, where Wren built wharves on both sides of the Fleet River and crowned the new St Bride’s with his most perfect spire. Pepys was given the Freedom of the City in 1699 for his services to Christ’s Hospital, which may have given him his last close look at once familiar streets.13

  He had a specially designed book desk built for his library and another of the great matching bookcases in 1699; now he had left the service of the navy he had to pay for them out of his own funds. The bookcase was the eighth, and some time before it was installed he had two drawings made of the library in York Buildings.14 They give a good impression of the arrangement of the furniture and pictures, and they also offer a glimpse into an adjoining room, where a small painting set in a gilt frame and showing the king of France on horseback can just be glimpsed, hung low on the wall above a leaf table with curly legs.15 The painter was Mary, and here was her mark on the house, and as an artist, for all to admire. After many years in the shadows she had at last become visible, and not only visible – she was mentionable, admired even. Evelyn’s grandson praised her as the mistress of the house, presiding like a Muse or Athene among the guests, in some Latin verses he sent to Pepys complimenting him on his Saturday gatherings. Pepys himself wrote of her making a call on his behalf to invite a friend to visit if he could ‘still afford an hour for Philosophy and a tansey’.16 Gentlemen sent her their wives’ compliments alongside their own, a significant sign of social acceptance. So respectable did she now appear that a French Protestant pastor, a refugee whom Pepys had assisted to a living in Ireland, invited her to be godmother to his child. Greetings came to her in letters from the good Dr Hickes and from Wanley, who took her position and influence to be such that ‘2 words from You Sir, Madam Skinner, or Mr Jackson’ would help him to a fellowship to which he aspired.17 Most strikingly of all, when Pepys gave £10 towards repairs to the old building of his college in Cambridge, she also sent her own donation of five guineas. It is marked in the college records as from ‘Madm Pepys’, and it speaks eloquently of her wish to support her companion of so many years in his interests and loyalties.18

  Early in 1698 an official pass was issued for John Jackson, Mary Skinner, Julia Shallcross and another woman friend to travel to France with two servants: a little holiday in which Pepys was not included. Instead he was busy planning a more ambitious project for his nephew, nothing less than a Grand Tour.19 The Houblons helped him prepare every step, with itineraries, introductions and arrangements to draw money, and Pepys appointed one of his servants, appropriately named Paris, to go with him. He was to travel through France, Switzerland, Italy, Spain and Portugal, seeing the sights and learning the languages, and reach Rome in time for the celebrations of the new century. Never was a young man sent off with so many instructions; Pepys kept the reins tightly in his hand, and his nephew responded to every twitch. He was to carry out commissions for Pepys, Mary and many others, and to write regularly detailing his experiences. When Pepys told him he must not omit the names of any friends from the greetings at the end of his letters, which he intended to pass round for all of them to see, Jackson did exactly as asked. He was not going to put a foot or a word wrong.

  Once he had left, his uncle fell into gloom, and his first letter to Jackson was a lament. Paul Lorrain, he said, was less willing than he had been. ‘I had rather (you know) beare with things not being done at all, or do them myself where I can (which truly now grows too much for me, especially as to copying) than see them done with reluctancy. Nor is this a small difficulty with me, as knowing too well my having no choice towards the solving it, there being no body but he that knows my business and manner of working, and at the same time qualifyd in every respect for doing it. So that the only true and adequate solution to it is, to knock quite off.’ That was not all: ‘add my having ¾ or more of my whole time to spend without anybody near me, to read or write word for me, or know how to fetch me a book out of my library or put it in its place again when done with; and this, as I grow older, growing less supportable’.20 No doubt Lorrain did want freedom to do his own work – he was preparing for ordination – and Pepys, always a demanding master, was made more so by increasing infirmities. Mary was able to step into the breach; many letters after this are in her hand and in her picturesque spelling.

  Pepys’s gloom was tied up with the state of his ulcerated kidney. Early in 1700 he wrote of being ‘unable to bear the stone in a coach’, and by March 1700 he was so ill that Lorrain sent a secret letter to Jackson, warning him how bad things were. The wound of the old stone operation had broken open, and three surgical interventions were necessary before it was more or less successfully stitched up. Pepys had the best surgeon in London, Charles Bernard, and the most fashionable doctor too, John Radcliffe. He showed his usual courage, and against the odds he recovered, after three weeks in bed, and characteristically wrote a detailed account of his symptoms and treatment to Jackson.21 In May the household moved to Hewer’s Clapham house. It was comfortable and airy, and Evelyn described it as ‘a very noble, and wonderful
ly well furnished house… the Offices and Gardens exceedingly well accommodated for pleasure and retirement’; but, as another friend, Henry Hyde, understood, Pepys was not a countryman by inclination. ‘I hope your being thus long at Clapham (for I thinke you were never soe long in the countrey before since you knew the world) will make you relish the pleasure of a garden,’ he wrote, not too hopefully.22

  Mary had been tending Pepys, but now she too fell ill again. She thought of taking herself to Paris for a cure – a little rivalry with Jackson perhaps. We know of her plan through Dr John Shadwell, Pepys’s godson, now the English ambassador’s physician in Paris, who kept up a skittish correspondence with Jackson: Mrs Skinner, Shadwell wrote, was thinking of trying the air of Paris ‘for her dropsy’. In his next letter he said the news from Clapham was good, ‘since it brings no account of the motions of your evil genius this way’; and in July he assured Jackson that ‘The Lady at London is at present so indisposed that she has wholly laid aside her thoughts of crossing the sea, so that there’s one exception the less to the place [Paris].’23 Clearly there was no love lost between Jackson and Mrs Skinner. Pepys meanwhile was pressing Jackson to buy some Spanish leather, a fan and an illuminated book for her, a commission he carried out carefully: pleasing Mary was a necessary part of pleasing his uncle.24